London · Observations · Society · Humour
The English are incredibly proud of their team reaching the final of Euro 2020. The Tower of London has even announced that, to mark such a remarkable achievement as the first appearance by an English team in the final of a tournament of this level since 1966, the drawbridge of
Archive · London · Museums · Heritage · Nature · Humour
If they call you a paper-pusher (literally, an "office rat"), don't be upset. After all, there was once a rat with a fondness for paperwork who became a co-founder of the National Archives of the United Kingdom. When the public figure, inventor and all-
Aristocracy · Architecture · Books · Heritage · People
A memorial marker at Yasnaya Polyana on the site of the house laid down by Prince Volkonsky, in which his grandson, Leo Tolstoy, would be born. Like the rebuilt estate of Bald Hills in «War and Peace», the house was built after the prince's death, and somewhat more
NB!
Faith · Art · Paris · Humour
The Lord Asks Adam and Eve to Observe Social Distancing. A fresco by the celebrated French painter Hippolyte Flandrin (1809-1864) in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the oldest church in Paris
Art · Moscow · Observations · Humour
When you learn that from tomorrow Moscow is once again at +30 and above. Well, here is a painting by John Martin, not the science-fiction writer, mind you, but the Romantic painter, dated 1841. It is called Pandemonium. Yes, yes, that very capital of hell in Milton's
Art · Society · Paris · People
Ugliness, a shapeless mass, a monster: this is how the patrons described Auguste Rodin's monument to Balzac. The statue at the intersection of the boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse still provokes controversy today. After a scandal that all France followed, Rodin kept the sculpture for himself and returned the
NB! · Archive · Mores · People
Do you know who is in the middle of this photograph, flanked by her sisters and brother? Seventeen-year-old Frida Kahlo, in a man's suit. The year was 1925, European fashionable ladies were only just beginning to work trousers into their wardrobes, and Frida already felt perfectly
NB! · Archive · Museums · Science
NB!
NB! · Art · Mores · Nature
A pet squirrel will surprise no one, but a domestic flying squirrel on a golden lead is a great rarity, even by the standards of the eighteenth century. 1765, John Singleton Copley, portrait of his half-brother Henry Pelham
Archive · Books · People · Rome
Byron visited the Roman Colosseum in 1817, when the ruins were still wholly overgrown with thick vegetation and a veritable carpet of flowers. He wrote of it: "I have passed some days in wondrous Rome, and am delighted with Rome. As a whole, Rome, both ancient and modern, is